In the spring of 2009, Obama went down to Cairo. He skipped the gaming tables at the Omar Khayyam Casino at the Cairo Marriott and instead went over to the Islamist baccarat tables at Cairo University and bet big on the Muslim Brotherhood.

Obama had insisted on Muslim Brotherhood attendance at a speech that was part apology and part abandonment. The apology was for American power and the abandonment was of American allies.

The text of the speech was largely inconsequential in the same way that most of the words that scroll across the teleprompters of politicians are. In politics, the speech is often the medium while the timing, the audience and the location are the message. And the message was that the Brotherhood’s hour had come.

Obama was following through on an idea that had long been an article of faith on the left. The idea was that the United States had invested in a defunct status quo and that our biggest problems were our allies. The only way out was to toss them all overboard.

Generations of diplomats had griped from their walled compounds in Riyadh, Kuwait City or Doha that many of our problems in the region would go away if Israel somehow went away. But this was bigger. It involved dumping every single allied government in the region to start fresh with new governments elected through popular democracy and enjoying popular support. It would be a new beginning. And a new beginning was also the title of the Cairo speech.

The idea wasn’t new, but it was right up there with proposals to unilaterally abandon our nuclear arsenal or dedicate ten percent of the budget to foreign aid; ideas that a lot of diplomats liked, but that they knew no one would ever be crazy enough to pull the trigger on.

And then Obama tried to pull the trigger on two out of three. What he wanted was for the Brotherhood to win so that it could make the War on Terror irrelevant.

As much as the advocates of smart and soft power insisted that Islamic terrorism had nothing to do with Islam, they knew better. They knew that Al Qaeda wanted to create Islamic states that would form into a Caliphate. Central to its thinking was that it would have to fight to create these states. But what if the Caliphate could be created without a war?

To make it happen, all America had to do was surrender the Middle East.

The attacks of September 11 had created a serious crisis for liberal policymakers. Unlike the bombing of the World Trade Center on Clinton’s watch, these attacks could not be ignored or swept under the rug. But neither could liberals accept a clash of civilizations that would destroy their multicultural society or an extended series of international police actions that would militarize the country.

The logic that led from September 11 to the Cairo speech to Benghazi was impeccable. It combined the clean sweep theory with grand scale appeasement.

“Islamic terrorists are carrying out attacks because they want their countries to be ruled by Islam. Why not help them to do it?”

The United States withdrew support from its allies. It apologized, surrendered and waited for the takeovers to begin. When the dictators wouldn’t step aside voluntarily, the bombers were sent in.

The grand bargain with the Muslim Brotherhood was supposed to end the War on Terror by trading the Muslim Brotherhood’s brand of political Islamism for Al Qaeda’s campaign of terror. It was as if FDR had struck a deal with the Bolsheviks to get rid of the Trotskyites (and indeed such a bargain did operate briefly during WW2).

Obama’s grand bargain came to a squalid end on September 11. In Benghazi, the Muslim Brotherhood militia that was supposed to protect the mission instead sold it out and abandoned it.

The Brotherhood would accept American support, but it wouldn’t stop terrorist attacks against America. Its front groups in America would not cooperate with the FBI, its governments and militias in the Middle East would not protect American diplomatic facilities.

On September 11, the American embassy in Cairo was besieged by protesters with the support of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Tunis, the new Islamist government turned its back on the embassy, forcing Hillary Clinton to plead with President Marzouki to send out his own presidential guard to defend it.

In Benghazi and Cairo, Al Qaeda attacked while the Brotherhood played dumb. In Syria, Brotherhood and Al Qaeda militias worked together, while Brotherhood spokesmen insisted that they were the only secular alternative. In the United States, Al Qaeda terrorists carried out their “lone wolf” attacks while the Brotherhood front groups which ran most of the Islamic organizations in America claimed not to know what was going on.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s victories did not make Al Qaeda go away. Instead the two found common ground while playing a game of Good Terrorist and Bad Terrorist. Or as the mainstream media calls it, Moderates and Extremists.

Obama had stacked all of our allies in the Middle East that didn’t have enough oil to matter and bet them at the Brotherhood’s casino on a single spin of the wheel. And the Brotherhood took it all.

But Obama is still at the casino stacking up more chips. The next round of the game moves to Syria. Instead of the Brotherhood using its new power to protect the United States, the United States is expected to get involved in another Iraq in order to help the Brotherhood take over Syria to complete the Islamist triumphs of the Arab Spring.

The United States has become a tool of Muslim Brotherhood expansionism. Obama helped the Brotherhood overthrow governments by political means, but now the Brotherhood is demanding military intervention to help a Brotherhood/Al Qaeda coalition take over Syria. And if Obama goes along with it, he will have turned the United States military into the mercenaries of the Muslim Brotherhood.

The root cause of terrorism is not American foreign policy, but Muslim foreign policy. Appeasement turns American foreign policy into an arm of Islamic expansionism.

Americans have died because of Obama’s dirty deal with the Muslim Brotherhood. The question now is whether Obama will send American soldiers and pilots to die for the Brotherhood.

As Egyptians of all factions prepare to demonstrate in mass against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi’s rule on June 30, the latter has been trying to reduce their numbers, which some predict will be in the millions and eclipse the Tahrir protests that earlier ousted Mubarak. Among other influential Egyptians, Morsi recently called on Coptic Christian Pope Tawadros II to urge his flock, Egypt’s millions of Christians, not to join the June 30 protests.

While that may be expected, more troubling is that the U.S. ambassador to Egypt is also trying to prevent Egyptians from protesting—including the Copts. The June 18th edition of Sadi al-Balad reports that lawyer Ramses Naggar, the Coptic Church’s legal counsel, said that during Patterson’s June 17 meeting with Pope Tawadros, she “asked him to urge the Copts not to participate” in the demonstrations against Morsi and the Brotherhood.

The Pope politely informed her that his spiritual authority over the Copts does not extend to political matters.

Regardless, many Egyptian activists are condemning Patterson for flagrantly behaving like the Muslim Brotherhood’s stooge. Leading opposition activist Shady el-Ghazali Harb said Patterson showed “blatant bias” in favor of Morsi and the Brotherhood, adding that her remarks had earned the U.S. administration “the enmity of the Egyptian people.” Coptic activists like George Ishaq openly told Patterson to “shut up and mind your own business.” And Christian business tycoon Naguib Sawiris—no stranger to Islamist hostility—posted a message on his Twitter account addressed to the ambassador saying “Bless us with your silence.”

Indeed, the U.S. ambassador’s position as the Brotherhood’s lackey is disturbing—and revealing—on several levels. First, all throughout the Middle East, the U.S. has been supporting anyone and everyone opposing their leaders—in Libya against Gaddafi, in Egypt itself against 30-year U.S. ally Mubarak, and now in Syria against Assad. In all these cases, the U.S. has presented its support in the name of the human rights and freedoms of the people against dictatorial leaders.

So why is the Obama administration now asking Christians not to oppose their rulers—in this case, Islamists—who have daily proven themselves corrupt and worse, to the point that millions of Egyptians, most of them Muslims, are trying to oust them?

What’s worse is that the human rights abuses Egypt’s Coptic Christians have been suffering under Muslim Brotherhood rule are significantly worse than the human rights abuses that the average Egyptian suffered under Mubarak—making the Copts’ right to protest even more legitimate, and, if anything, more worthy of U.S support.

Among other things, under Morsi’s rule, the persecution of Copts has practically been legalized, as unprecedented numbers of Christians—men, women, and children—have been arrested, often receiving more than double the maximum prison sentence, under the accusation that they “blasphemed” Islam and/or its prophet. It was also under Morsi’s reign that another unprecedented scandal occurred: the St. Mark Cathedral—holiest site of Coptic Christianity and headquarters to the Pope Tawadros himself—was besieged in broad daylight by Islamic rioters. When security came, they too joined in the attack on the cathedral. And the targeting of Christian children—for abduction, ransom, rape, and/or forced conversion—has also reached unprecedented levels under Morsi. (For more on the plight of the Copts under Morsi’s rule, see my new book Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians.)

Yet despite the fact that if anyone in Egypt has a legitimate human rights concern against the current Egyptian government, it most certainly is the Christian Copts, here is the U.S., in the person of Ms. Patterson, asking them not to join the planned protests.

In other words, and consistent with Obama administration’s doctrine, when Islamists—including rapists and cannibals—wage jihad on secular leaders, the U.S. supports them; when Christians protest Islamist rulers who are making their lives a living hell, the administration asks them to “know their place” and behave like dhimmis, Islam’s appellation for non-Muslim “infidels” who must live as third class “citizens” and never complain about their inferior status.